Java Pattern - RegEx not matching for link search

Question

I have a String variable called 'page' that contains the html content of a site page. When I try to search for the link tags using my regex (using Java Pattern) I get no matches yet when I tested my regex online I got many matches for the same website content.

..
String pattern = "]*>(.*?)";
Pattern r = Pattern.compile(pattern);

//page is a String that contains the whole html of a webpage
Matcher m = r.matcher(page);

System.out.println(page);

if(m.find()){
    System.out.println("Found matches");
}
else{
  System.out.println("Found nothing");
}

Eder · Accepted Answer

You are required to escape the backslash character from the string literal, in Java as well as in many other programming languages the \ is used as escape sequence. For regexes, the \ is also used for escaping purposes.

Basically, you'll need to escape your pattern as follows:

String pattern = "a\b[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>";

Working Example:

package SO_35187662;

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class SO_35187662 {

    private static String REG_EX;
    private static String HTML_TEXT;

    static {
        REG_EX = "]*>(.*?)<\/a>";
        HTML_TEXT = "1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production3.1 Development
3.2 Pre-production
3.3 Casting
3.4 Filming
3.5 Post-production
3.6 Music
4 Release4.1 Marketing
4.2 Merchandise
4.3 Home media5 Reception5.1 Box office5.1.1 Theatrical run
5.1.2 Commercial analysis
5.2 Critical response
5.3 Accolades5.3.1 Top ten lists";
    }

    public static void main(String... args) {
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(REG_EX);
        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(HTML_TEXT);

        while (matcher.find()) {
            System.out.println(matcher.group(1));
        } 
    }
}

Java Pattern - RegEx not matching for link search

Answers (1)

Working Example:

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